The No. 3 branch of the Shanghai People's Procuratorate on Wednesday sued nine people accused of counterfeiting and manufacturing LEGO toys.
The criminal gang, busted by Chinese police in April 2019, were found replicating an unapproved LEGO architecture set of "The Great Wall of China" and sold them online and offline under the brand of Lepin, a domestic toymaker.
The Lepin bricks were identified as replicas of authentic LEGO products by the Copyright Protection Center of China.
Investigation showed that the gang had manufactured and sold more than 4.24 million boxes of toys almost identical to LEGO products between September 2017 and April 2019, with the amount of illegal income exceeding 300 million yuan (about 42.7 million U.S. dollars).
China has made a series of achievements over the past year to create a friendly environment for business, innovation and high-quality intellectual property development.
In 2019, Shanghai prosecutors approved the arrests of 697 people, 683 of whom were prosecuted, with 23,000 cases of first instance related to intellectual property rights concluded by local courts, up 9.6 percent year on year.
